Testaments Betrayed: An Essay in Nine Parts

by Milan Kundera

  The way Kafka's collected works were published in France shocks no one; it corresponds to the spirit of the time: "Kafka is to be read as a whole," the editor explains; "among his various modes of expression, none can claim greater worth than the others. Such is the decision of the posterity we are; it is an acknowledged judgment and one that must be accepted. Sometimes we go further: not only do we reject any hierarchy among genres but we deny the very existence of genres, we assert that Kafka speaks the same lan-

  guage throughout his work. In Kafka is finally achieved the situation everywhere sought or always hoped for-a perfect correspondence between lived experience and literary expression."

  "Perfect correspondence between lived experience and literary expression." This is a variant of Sainte-Beuve's slogan: "Literature inseparable from its author." A slogan that recalls: "The unity of life and work." Which evokes the famous line wrongly attributed to Goethe: "Life like a work of art." These magical catchphrases are simultaneously statements of the obvious (of course what a man does is inseparable from him), countertruths (inseparable or not, the creation surpasses the life), and lyrical cliches (the unity of life and work "everywhere sought or always hoped for" is presented as an ideal state, a Utopia, a lost paradise at last regained), but most important, they reveal the wish to refuse art its autonomous status, to force it back into its source, into the authors life, to dilute it there and thus deny its raison d'etre (if a life can be a work of art, what use are works of art?). The sequence Kafka chose for the stories in his collections is disregarded because the only sequence considered valid is that dictated by life itself. No one cares about the artist Kafka, who troubles us with his puzzling aesthetic, because we'd rather have Kafka as the fusion of experience and work, the Kafka who had a difficult relationship with his father and didn't know how to deal with women. Hermann Broch protested when his work was put into a small context with Svevo and Hofmannsthal. Poor Kafka, he wasn't granted even that small context. When people speak of him, they don't mention Hofmannsthal, or Mann, or Musil, or

  Broch; they leave him only one context: Felice, the father, Milena, Dora; he is flung back into the mini-mini-mini-context of his biography, far from the history of the novel, very far from art.

  13

  The Modern Era made man-the individual, a thinking ego-into the basis of everything. From that new conception of the world came a new conception of the work of art as well. It became the original expression of a unique individual. It is in art that the individualism of the Modern Era was realized and confirmed, found its expression, its consecration, its glory, its monument.

  If a work of art emanates from an individual and his uniqueness, it is logical that this unique being, the author, should possess all rights over the thing that emanates exclusively from him. After a centuries-long process, these rights attained their definitive form during the French Revolution, which recognized literary property as "the most sacred, the most personal of all property."

  I remember the days when I was enchanted by Moravian folk music: the beauty of its melodic phrases; the originality of its metaphors. How are such songs born? Collectively? No; that art had its individual creators, its village poets and composers, but once their invention was released into the world, they had no way of following after it and protecting it against changes, distortions, endless metamorphoses. At the time, I was much like those who looked upon such a

  world with no artistic-property claims as a kind of paradise; a paradise where poetry was made by all and for all.

  I evoke this memory to point out that the great figure of the Modern Era, the author, emerged only gradually over these recent centuries and that in the history of humanity, the era of authors' rights is a fleeting moment, brief as a photoflash. And yet, without the prestige of the author and his rights, the great blossoming of European art in recent centuries would be inconceivable, and so would Europe's greatest glory. Its greatest or perhaps its only glory, because, if reminder is needed, it's not for its generals or its statesmen that Europe was admired even by those it caused to suffer.

  For authors' rights to become law, it required a certain frame of mind that was inclined to respect the author. That frame of mind, which took shape slowly over the centuries, seems to be coming undone lately. If not, thev couldn't accompany a toilet paper commercial with a passage from a Brahms symphony. Or be praised for publishing abridged versions of Stendhal novels. If there were still a frame of mind that respects the author, people would wonder: Would Brahms agree to this? Wouldn't Stendhal be angry?

  I examine the new version of the French law on authors' rights: the problems of writers, composers, painters, poets, novelists take up a minute part of it, most of the text being devoted to the great industry called "audiovisual." There's no question this immense industry requires entirely new rules of the game. Because the situation has changed: what we persist in calling "art" is less and less the "original expression of a unique individual." How can the screenwriter for a

  film that costs millions prevail with his own moral rights (say, the right to prevent tampering with what he wrote) when involved in its creation is a battalion of other persons, who also consider themselves authors and whose moral rights are reciprocally limited by his; and how claim anything at all against the will of the producer, who though not an author is certainly the film's only real boss?

  Even without their rights being restricted, authors in the old-style arts are suddenly thrust into another world where authors' rights are starting to lose their old aura. When a conflict arises in this new climate, those who violate authors' moral rights (adapters of novels; garbage-can scavengers who plunder great writers with their so-called critical editions; advertising that dissolves a thousand-year-old legacy in its bloody saliva; periodicals that reprint whatever they want without permission; producers who interfere with filmmakers' work; stage directors who treat texts so freely that only a madman could still write for the theater; and so on) have general opinion on their side, whereas an author claiming his moral rights risks winding up without public sympathy and with judicial support that is rather grudging, for even the guardians of the laws are sensitive to the mood of the time.

  I think of Stravinsky. Of his tremendous effort to preserve all his work in his own performances as an unimpeachable standard. Samuel Beckett behaved similarly: he took to attaching more and more detailed stage directions to his plays, and insisted (contrary to the usual tolerance) that they be strictly observed; he often attended rehearsals in order to evaluate the direction, and sometimes did it himself; he even pub-

  lished as a book the notes for his own production of Endgame in Germany so as to establish it for good. His publisher and friend, Jerome Lindon, stands watch-if need be, to the point of lawsuit-to insure that his authorial wishes are respected even after his death.

  Such major effort to give a work a definitive form, thoroughly worked out and supervised by the author, is unparalleled in history. It is as if Stravinsky and Beckett wanted to protect their work not only against the current practice of distortion but also against a future less and less likely to respect a text or a score; it is as if they hoped to provide an example, the ultimate example of the supreme concept of author: one who demands the complete realization of his aesthetic wishes.

  14

  Kafka sent the manuscript of "The Metamorphosis" to a magazine whose editor, Robert Musil, was prepared to publish it on the condition that the author shorten it. (Ah, sorry encounters between great writers!) Kafka's reaction was as glacial and as categoric as Stravinsky's to Ansermet. He could bear the idea of not being published at all, but the idea of being published and mutilated he found unbearable. His concept of authorship was as absolute as Stravinsky's or Beckett's, but whereas they more or less succeeded in imposing theirs, he failed to do so. This failure is a turning point in the history of authors' rights.

  In 1925, when Brod published the two letters known as Kafka's testament in his "Postscript to the First Edition" o
f The Trial, he explained that Kafka

  knew full well that his wishes would not be fulfilled. Let us assume that Brod was telling the truth, that those two letters were indeed only expressing a bad mood, and that on the subject of any eventual (very improbable) posthumous publication of Kafka's writings, everything had been fully understood between the two friends; in that case, Brod, the executor, could take full responsibility upon himself and publish whatever he thought best; in that case, he had no moral obligation to inform us of Kafka's wishes, which, according to Brod, were not valid or were so no longer.

  Yet he hastened to publish these "testamentary" letters and to give them as much impact as possible; actually, he had already begun to create the greatest work of his life, his myth of Kafka, one of whose crucial components is precisely that wish, unique in all of history-the wish of an author who would annihilate all his work. And thus is Kafka engraved on the public's memory. In accordance with what Brod gives us to believe in his mythographic novel, where, with no nuance whatever, Garta/Kafka would destroy everything he has written; because he is dissatisfied with it artistically? ah no, Brod's Kafka is a religious thinker; remember: wanting not to proclaim but "to live his faith," Garta granted no great importance to his writings, "mere rungs to help him climb to the heights." His friend, Nowy/Brod, refuses to obey him because even though what Garta wrote was "mere sketches," they could help "wandering humanity" in its quest for the path of righteousness to "something irreplaceable."

  With Kafka's "testament," the great legend of Saint Kafka/Garta is born, and along with it a littler legend-of Brod his prophet, who with touching earnest-

  ness makes public his friends last wish even as he confesses why, in the name of very lofty principles, he decided not to obey him. The great mythographer won his bet. His act was elevated to the rank of a great gesture worthy of emulation. For who could doubt Brod's loyalty to his friend? And who would dare doubt the value of every sentence, every word, every single syllable Kafka left to humanity?

  And thus did Brod create the model for disobedience to dead friends; a judicial precedent for those who would circumvent an authors last wish or divulge his most intimate secrets.

  15

  With regard to the unfinished stories and novels, I readily concede that they would put any executor in a very uncomfortable situation. For among these writings of varying significance are the three novels; and Kafka wrote nothing greater than these. Yet it is not at all abnormal that because they were unfinished he ranked them among his failures; an author has trouble believing that the value of a work he has not seen through to the end might already be almost fully discernible, before it is done. But what an author is incapable of seeing may be clear to the eyes of an outsider. Yes, because of these three novels I admire boundlessly, I would not have found the strength to carry out fully Kafka's "testament."

  Who could have confirmed me in that position?

  Our greatest Master. Let's open Don Quixote, Part One, Chapters Twelve, Thirteen, Fourteen: Don Quixote

  and Sancho are in the mountains, where they learn the story of Grisostomo, a young poet in love with a shepherdess. To be near her, he himself becomes a shepherd; but she doesn't love him, and Grisostomo ends his life. Don Quixote decides to attend the burial. Ambrosio, a friend of the poet, conducts the modest ceremony. Beside the flower-covered body there are notebooks and sheets of poems. Ambrosio tells the gathering that Grisostomo requested that they be burned.

  At that moment a gentleman who has joined the mourners out of curiosity, Senor Vivaldo, intervenes: he disputes the idea that burning the poetry truly answers to the dead man's wish, for a wish must make sense and this one does not. It would therefore be better to give his poetry to other people, that it might bring them pleasure, wisdom, experience. And without waiting for Ambrosios response, he bends down and takes a few of the pages nearest to him. Ambrosio says to him: "Out of courtesy, sir, I will permit you to keep those that you have taken; but it is futile to think that I will refrain from burning the rest."

  "Out of courtesy, I will permit you"; meaning that even though a dead friends wish has for me the force of law, I am not a lackey to the laws, I respect them as a free being who is not blind to other values, values that may stand opposed to the law, such as, for instance, courtesy or the love of art. That is why "I will permit you to keep those that you have taken," while hoping that my friend will forgive me. Still, in making this exception I have violated his wish, which for me is law; I have done so on my own responsibility, at my own risk, and I've done so as a violation of a law, not

  as a denial and nullification of it; that is why "it is futile to think that I will refrain from burning the rest.

  16

  A television broadcast: three famous and admired women collectively propose that women too should have the right to be buried in the Pantheon. It's important, they say, to consider the symbolic significance of this act. And they immediately suggest the names of some great dead women who, in their opinion, could be moved there.

  A fair demand, certainly; yet something about it troubles me: these dead women who could be moved right over to the Pantheon, aren't they now lying beside their husbands? Certainly; and they wanted it so. What then are we to do with the husbands? Move them too? That would be hard; not being important enough, they must stay where they are, and the wives that have been moved out will spend their eternity in widows' solitude.

  Then I say to myself: and what about the men already in the Pantheon? Yes, the men! Are they perchance in the Pantheon of their own will? It was after they died, without asking their opinion, and certainly contrary to their last wishes, that it was decided to turn them into symbols and separate them from their wives.

  After Chopin's death, Polish patriots cut up his body to take out his heart. They nationalized this poor muscle and buried it in Poland.

  A dead person is treated either as trash or as a symbol. Either way, it's the same disrespect to his vanished individuality.

  17

  Ah, it's so easy to disobey a dead person. If, nonetheless, we sometimes submit to his wishes, it is not out of fear, out of duress, but because we love him and refuse to believe him dead. If an old peasant on his deathbed begs his son not to cut down the old pear tree outside the window, the pear tree will not be cut down for as long as the son remembers his father with love.

  This has little to do with any religious belief in the eternal life of the soul. It's simply that a dead person I love will never be dead for me. I can't even say: "I loved him"; no, its: "I love him." And my refusing to speak of my love for him in the past tense means that the dead person is. That may be the seat of man's religious dimension. Indeed, obedience to a last wish is mysterious: it goes bevond all practical and rational thought: the old peasant will never know, in his grave, if the pear tree has been cut down or not; yet for the son who loves him, it is impossible to not obey him.

  Long ago I was moved (I still am) by the end of Faulkner's novel The Wild Palms. The woman dies of a botched abortion, the man is in prison under a ten-year sentence; a white tablet, poison, is brought to him in his cell; but he quickly dismisses the idea of suicide, because his only way of prolonging the life of the beloved woman is to preserve her in his memory.

  "… so when she became not then half of memory

  became not and if I become not then all of remembering will cease to be.-Yes, he thought, between grief and nothing I will take grief."

  Later on, writing The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, I immersed myself in the character Tamina, who has lost her husband and is trying desperately to recover, to gather, scattered memories so as to reconstruct a person who has disappeared, a bygone past; it was then that I began to understand that a memory doesn't give us back the dead person's presence; memories are only confirmation of his absence; in memories the dead person is only a past that is fading, receding, inaccessible.

  Yet if it is impossible for me ever to regard as dead the being I love, how will his
presence be manifested?

  In his wishes, which I know and with which I will keep faith. I think of the old pear tree that will stand outside the window for as long as the peasant's son shall live.

  Milan Kundera

  ***

  [1] At last, an occasion to cite Rene Girard; his Mensonge romantique et verite romanesque is the best book I have ever read on the art of the novel.

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  [2] Lakis Proguidis, Un ecrivain malgre la critique (Paris: Gallimard, 1989).

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  [3] Jaroslav Vogel, Leos Janacek (Prague, 1963: revised English translation, New York: W. W. Norton, 1981), a detailed and honest book, but limited in its judgments by its national and nationalistic horizon. Bartok and Berg, the two composers most closely related to Janacek on the international scene: the former is not mentioned at all, the latter barely. How is one to locate Janacek on the map of modern music without these two reference points?

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